‘The Making of Zombie Wars,’ by Aleksandar Hemon

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By David Gilbert

June 2, 2015

The Summer of Love rolled into town and left behind an S.T.D. otherwise known as 1968. The Vietnam War ratcheted up the body count. Racial strife led to nationwide riots. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy must have made the end times seem at bloody hand. Cue Nixon and that silent majority. Forty-seven years later we still live in the era’s apocalyptic shadow, those events a zombie horde in ever-present pursuit — race issues, ill-considered wars, the Russians — that infects us with the undead past. Oh, and you can also blame 1968 for that unfortunate metaphor, because in October of that year George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” introduced us to a new kind of zombie: slow yet relentless, brainless yet hungry, endlessly symbolic yet always supercool. These flesh eaters have fed well on our culture, evolving from B-movie ghouls to bankable, if thankless, stars of film and screen, book and video game, to the point where they should probably unionize. We are living in peak zombie. Now, into this fray tiptoes Aleksandar Hemon with his latest novel, “The Making of Zombie Wars.”

Yes, that Aleksandar Hemon: Sarajevo-­born, the Bosnian Bellow, who in 1992 found himself visiting Chicago just as the 1,425-day siege of his home city commenced. A tourist suddenly turned refugee, Hemon began a crash course in English, stitching together a life through odd jobs, until he went full Nabokov and started publishing wonderful, autobiographical short stories that delved into the statelessness of his own being. In 2000 came a highly praised collection, “The Question of Bruno,” followed a couple of years later by the even better “Nowhere Man,” after which he made a detour into novel terrain with “The Lazarus Project” before returning to the tombolo of short stories with “Love and Obstacles.” His nonfiction is staggering as well. Hemon has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur “genius grant” and various other awards and nominations, and he’s probably taller than I am as well. I remember meeting his alter ego, Jozef Pronek, in The New Yorker and being instantly hooked by the giddy side effects of his second language. The everyday struggle with existence was coupled with the universal striving for the right word, the right story, to anchor the self against the currents of horror. Hemon is certainly familiar with limbo and bloodshed, but seeing the phrase “zombie wars” in the title of his new book is akin to discovering that Ibsen had written an episode of “Three’s Company.”

“The Making of Zombie Wars” does retain a taste of Sarajevo by way of a cast of shaggy secondary characters — a damaged bruiser and a femme fatale, a nihilistic lackey — but for the most part this is Hemon’s first foray into the purely American soul, its container a Jewish 33-year-old aspiring screenwriter/teacher of English as a second language. Joshua Levin suffers from the trifecta of family and privilege and aimlessness; he’s ambitious but full of self-loathing — in other words, a cinematic studies major who minored in philosophy. Peppered throughout the novel are snippets of his film ideas, all of them gloriously high-concept (“Idea No. 135: A terminally ill woman goes on a road trip to California with her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. They took the trip 50 years before for their honeymoon. She remembers everything, he remembers nothing. Halfway there, she realizes that he thinks she is his mistress. Title: ‘The End of the Past’ ”). Someone in Hollywood should option the book for these nuggets alone. The problem is, Joshua has no follow-through; he’s all pitch. As we’re told early: “Substantial portions of Joshua’s life had been wasted before, leaving no trace of trauma or regret.” Now, though, he’s hit upon “Zombie Wars” for his Screenwriting II ­continuing-ed workshop, and his blowhard teacher is excited while his far more successful (and slightly improbable) girlfriend hopes this might augur the beginning of greater intimacy. Each chapter opens with a brief taste of “Zombie Wars,” the story as ludicrous as you would hope, with the Army doctor Major Klopstock trying to save the world from the ravenous undead. Otherwise, the story belongs to Joshua.

Hemon has always been a writer of the flesh, reveling in what the body reveals, gross anatomy often distracting from contemplation of the soul. So many of his characters have pimples, boils, goiters and warts, dandruff and rashes, various stinks and odors. Matters of fate can rest on a full bladder. Joshua moves through this cast of dermatological misfits, from Stagger, his Desert Storm vet landlord with an underwear fetish, to the femme fatale’s warted husband. The novel is a riff on the picaresque, Joshua Levin the most passive-aggressive of entitled rogues.

Early on, Hemon says about writing that it’s “nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.” That description could apply to Joshua as well. That is, until he kisses the wrong girl, and a dead cat lands at his feet. A samurai sword comes into play. It all has the quirky vibe of the movie “Something Wild,” and the displacing tonal shifts too. The slapstick action takes place on the eve of the Iraq war and is the result of Joshua’s dealings with those displaced Bosnians, who retain their human form but are essentially dead inside. They are Lazarus, the ur-zombie, resurrected with Jesus long gone and no family in sight. And Joshua himself is a version of the American undead, living to consume yet resenting every bite.

The book is funny and pleasantly loose, though not always a success. The scenes with the extended Levin family don’t quite land, nor does a brief foray into Hollywood satire. But who really cares? The writing is always worthy of your time. A purse slumps on a chair “like a deflated heart, and just as full of secrets.” A woman’s lips are “more than full, much better than thick. Lips, like clouds, forced clichés upon you.” A cleft chin is “mandibular cleavage.” The ultimate American dream is “the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now.” Every page contains these sorts of pleasures.

But there is also something more serious at hand. Two epigraphs set up the dialectic: one from Baruch de Spinoza, the great philosopher of the self, the other from George W. Bush, the great miscommunicator of the unself. Spinoza tells us we are all one, while Bush insists they are all other. And in 2003, the year in which “The Making of Zombie Wars” is set, the United States seemed to be all brainless gut, a zombie nation feeding on revenge without thinking of consequence. The Bosnian characters remind us of the aftereffects, of Joshua’s blindly tripping into action, of the dangers of the thirst for flesh. For the most part, the book does not wear this theme heavily (though there are a few unfortunate references to the phrase “let’s roll”). It is history, as one character says, as “badly translated joke.” This funny, free-flowing, gloriously imperfect book has the impression of an important writer in transition, of moving from the dead toward the living, of trying to have some fun despite this land so crowded with the lost and the lamented. In the end, we are all fighting our zombie wars, and we all need stories to keep us moving.